> Ellen Meiksins Wood has it right I think in the
> title of her her work: The Empire of Capital.
Clearly I need to read this book. I have been grappling myself with some of these questions, and don't feel that I've gotten much clarity.
I agree strongly with Carrol's basic idea: the world empire is in some sense an empire of capital over all states, not an empire of one state over others.
But states are also very real, and they still contend. Russia and the US are not simply two of Capital's functionaries. Or to put it another way: in a social (not an economic) sense, the national elites haven't been blenderized into a single trans-national elite yet. To some degree they remain rival teams or factions, each striving for advantage over the others.
So I can't quite go along with Carrol -- yet, anyway -- on a few points:
> ALL the first and second line capitalist states* have been
> very happy to leave that task to the United States. (*The EU and Japan;
> Russia and China; Brazil and India.).... Afghanistan's geopolitical
> importance to world capital is obvious, hence the satisfaction, it seems
> to me, with which China and Russia approve of coalition activities
> there.
I don't quite see this -- either the geopolitical importance, or the satisfaction. I'm open to persuasion, though, and if Carrol or anyone else would like to make this case in more detail I would be very grateful.
> And Israel remains a key geopolitical and military resource for the
> carrying out of this endless struggle to maintain a world safe for
> capitalism.
And this I strongly doubt. During the Cold War, when the Sovs were playing footsie with many of the neighboring states, Israel may have been a chesspiece of some value. Now, its value is near zero, as far as I can see, and may actually be negative.
Yet the chaps on the bridge of the US deathstar continue to back it. To the hilt. Why?
Perhaps our image of the rational, farsighted, calculating unitary hegemon is as wrong as our picture of Homo Oeconomicus. Perhaps our rulers are a loose collection of short-sighted but cunning gangsters, each with his own turf and his own little enterprise to maintain and expan. Perhaps they reel from crisis to crisis, contending with each other on a daily basis.
Of course they have lots of common ground -- like the Guelphs and Ghibellines; and if the rest of us ever got, well, restive, they would all gather on that common ground pretty quickly.
But as long as we're quiet, they can fight among themselves to their hearts' content.
So perhaps the best way to evoke rationality on the Empire's part is to storm the Bastille. How dialectical is THAT?
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org